Anthony Lee is a developer on large scale web servers and applications like NodeHost and Hey.Café! Hey.Café is a social network built around communities called cafés and it is ads free. Using the social network requires beans you can earn more based on the time you are on the app. He has been on the internet longer than usual. He also built the old social network Avatar for café Twii Twii back in the day. He is always ready to help any way that he can.
1. Advice for not too depressed on businesses during an epidemic
The advice is to get away from your desk, get away from your fast home connection, and go somewhere with a little background noise that you find relaxing. You will be shocked at how much you can get done when you have a limited connection and no access to your media and devices at home.
2. Remarkable challenges did you have to overcome at the beginning of your journey.
I had nobody around me when I started. Nobody around me had any interest in technology, or at least the programming and creation side. The first memory I have with me is a computer running windows 98. I made a small mini tank like game with it. This was my first programming experience. I was lucky in the regard that I got computer access early on. But that was early on, and I did experiments but never learn about making big projects until when I made a Pokémon fan site and then later made an online Pokémon RPG.
3. Significant failures, and what did you learn from them.
Not backing up, closing projects, and working on too many things. Every early project other than a few made in the last 10 years are lost forever. I have lost full proper built games, video skits with friends, websites, and every early version of every project. I never kept even screenshots except for the few I have recently tracked down online from archive sites. Now I save everything, and have online backups of every project, including Twii a social network that I built back over a decade ago and closed down in 2017. Keep backups of everything you make, take screenshots and videos or you will regret it later in life.
4. Biggest mentors in this industry and what is the best advice they have ever given you.
Matt Cuts. He single handedly made me want to take projects more seriously with his Google SEO videos back in the day. I hate Google now but at the time I was not as privacy focused as I am now. His videos, guides got me into the depths of the internet making me build crawlers, bots and even a few times a search engine myself.
5. If you could go back and tell yourself one thing before beginning your career what would it be?
Don’t get stuck on making every project you think about. I have managed to build 3 search engines, 4 versions of Twii before it was shutdown, 2 webs based OS projects, a programming language, hosting platform, webmail service, 5 games including 2 web based games and one I rebuilt 3 times and never finished. Oh and a LOT MORE! I know it can be really fun to make all types of projects but sometimes you need to sit back and work on one thing at a time.
6. As an entrepreneur, how do you define success?
When you make a project that you enjoy using, but you also enjoy working on. Finding that project can be hard, and once you find this project you will want to see it grow and succeed. For most this will be when you find the project that will pay all your bills. But doesn’t focus on this or burn out will happen. Enjoy what you are working on.
7. Why hey.cafe is ad free?
I hate ads so much. I block every account that advertises to me on Twitter. Advertising has become a plague on the internet in the last 20 years and the name of the game now to make money is to embed and inject services that track and destroy a user’s privacy to make a few bucks. I want hey.cafe to be user funded and built to be sustainable long term with a low run cost and easy scalability. Ads make things easy but they are harmful to the end user. I hope more services turn to user funding and remove ads.
